With rapid growth of mobile computing devices, such as laptops, smart phones and touchpads, it has been increasingly popular to use these as source devices to stream multimedia data, including audio and video data, through WiFi networks and for playback on a remote display on a sink device in real time. Especially, the development of Miracast wireless technology enables the devices to be used to stream videos, movies, games, and webpages to external high definition displays without the mediation of a wireless access point. Wi-Fi Direct allows source and display devices to discover one another and provides the underlying device-to-device connectivity for Miracast. Miracast builds upon Wi-Fi Direct with mechanisms to negotiate video capabilities, setup content protection (if needed), stream content, and maintain the video session.
The transmission of audio and video data generally involves capturing data from various devices, such as screen capture from a computer, or audio/video capture from cameras, multiplexing the audio and video data together to form packages that are then transmitted through a communication network in the form of transport steams (TS) such as defined in an MPEG format.
Conventionally, transport Stream had been designed for broadcast or offline applications, and so the associated multiplexers designed to process data for such purposes e.g. through satellite networks or cable networks, where latency rarely poses concern. However, in the context of real time playback of the streamed audio/video, latency between data capture on the source device and playback on the sink device can cause disadvantageous and conspicuous discontinuity of play on the sink display and thus problematic.